poetry
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They Lifted Me Up
Lee Meitzen Grue when she came up after open mike at the Gold Mine and suggested a journal for the poem I’d just read and later solicited a poem for New Laurel Review. Darrel Borque, before a large crowd as he handed on the state laureate ‘s crown to his successor, when he said, So… Continue reading
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We’re really beyond that
One woman wrote, “I am afraid that what I want to say will not be important enough.”on reading this statement, another student remarked: “You should drop that part. we’re really beyond that.” “Notes re: Echo,” Sept. 8, strophe 3Kathleen Fraser The books I brought to the beach: Epic Postmodernism an Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries.… Continue reading
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Sweet Ophelia
The dreadful drowned all float face down except for sweet Ophelia –Mark Folse Continue reading
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This Machine Kills Fascists
I—just—can’t anymore. I’m falling apart. The world is falling apart. I just want to fall into your arms and sleep. But this is not some stupid, self-induced hangover. This is a house fire in a hurricane in a pandemic. With zombies. Fast zombies. Why is double-tap funny in a zombie moviebut you have a lot… Continue reading
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NUTS*
It’s over.The American Experiment.It’s over. The results are in.It failed.Where do we go now?Overseas or into the streets? I don’t want another country.I want America back.Country of muskets. Country of tommy guns.Country of Saratoga. Country of Gettysburg.Country of Bastogne. Country of Iwo Jima.Country of Detroit 67. Country of Chicago 68 Burn, Baby. Burn. We cheered… Continue reading
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I Want A Cigarette So Bad
I want a cigarette so bad my hand trembles at the thought of the flare of the match. Fire. Smoke. Calm as ancient as frankincense, smoke rising up to the heavens. I want a steady hand so bad my stomach clenches at the thought of the meds paych’s pill nurses would push to calm my craving… Continue reading
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A-I-a-i-no
What art if any? No, it’s not possible, from a statistical concurrence and concordance of wordshowever clever, from the library of books scatteredat random on the floor: the Internet.Large language models pile up wordslike Legos: that plastic thing it’s not a bird.No algorithmic prayer makes the golemsing or dance or draw: Soul is morethan mathematics… Continue reading
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deadfall
deadfall isn’t death: a native feast for mushroom and ground cover, for all that crawls beneath the leaves and all that climb or call from trees. Continue reading
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Snowshoeing on the Red River of the North
What brought a boy from Bayou St. Johnto the frigid edge of the Red River of the North,on a sunny, windless 10° day in February,to strap on bentwood & gut beavertail snowshoes& crunch contentedly into the solitary snow? There was a single tree on an isolated spit of landbehind the adjacent subdivision where only I… Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 